> Hmm, the US now has its most inequitable distribution of wealth since
> the Gilded Age, has just conducted its first "preemptive" war and is
> now terrorizing Iraq as a brutal occupying power. We're on the glide
> path for a better tomorrow, no doubt about it. Inch by inch, the Revo
> is taking place before our very eyes.
That is precisely what I deny, dammit! There *is* no revolution taking place before our eyes. That's just the point -- we are *not* in anything like a revolutionary, or even a pre-revolutionary, situation now. That much should be obvious even to the most ignorant. The absence of a revolutionary process is the whole premise of my whole outlook on the present political situation, and the basic difference between people who think like me and people who think like you.
Since we are *not* in a revolutionary process, there is no point in discussing the present situation as though we were. Of course the progress that has been made up to now, and is being made now, is only spotty -- confined to certain areas, and only up to a certain degree in each area. That's the way things go in a bourgeois capitalist system. But progress has been and is being made in some areas and it needs to be recognized and understood, so that we can make similar progress in other areas. And on the other hand, where progress is not being made, that needs to be recognized and understood.
People who persist in prattling about "the revolution" at this point are just running on nostalgia for the "good old days" of 1917, IMHO. If Marx were living today and observing the U.S. situation, he would have lots of perceptive things to say about it (keep in mind that even in his time he said the U.S. was one of the few countries where the working class could work with the legislative system, rather than having to overthrow it), but he wouldn't be using this highly oversimplified, black-and-white, linear "revolutionary/counterrevolutionary" framework.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax